The Graham Greene Gambit

The writer Joy Williams once spit wit at a young author regarding what makes a great novelist. “They can do everything,” she said. “That’s sort of the point. You gotta do everything well.” Bad news for all the sentence hobbyists. You can’t just provoke attention. You have to sustain it. Not just with good syntax, but good scenes, good dialogue, good pacing, good action, good structure, and ideally some amount of gold that’s spun from whatever mess of hay we find ourselves rummaging through as humans, as Americans, as writers in a supposedly and increasingly post-literate age. Do it all as well as possible, and don’t forget to tell the truth.